Scientific Truth
This ought to be a brief one. Recently, more than ever, it has felt impossible to know what’s true. My response to almost any news story is skepticism. I feel unstuck from truths I held to be self evident, and nothing is immune from re-litigation. Figuring out what’s true has become a time-consuming affair, even for things I would have unquestioningly believed a year or two ago. Glenn Greenwald’s Russia reporting is one such example. A year ago I naively listened to the NYT podcast “The Daily”, thinking that Mueller was going to uncover the secret communications of Trump with Putin, and this would be the end of the bad orange man. This is a deranged mindset and the fact that I fell for shit like this has contributed to my current position.
My realization that I had not long ago been deranged, intersected with a pop-culture rise in Post-Modernist thinking. The phrase “that we can never really know something is true”, and scientific truth is one way among many to investigate truth had wormed it’s way into my life. I can’t say I was ever compelled by that. My position clarified itself in an conversation with my friend’s girlfriend, who took the post-modernist position. My gut reaction to this argument, which I had never seriously grappled with, was of course we can know things are true. While I concede that technically nothing can be known with 100% certainty, things can be known with high enough certainty that within the time-space we inhabit, things can be known to be true well enough that the rules will never be broken within the lifespan of the human species.
The fundamental thing that allows us to know something is true is predictive power. A simple example; gravity. Newton theorized that the force of gravity is proportional to the mass of the body. We also know that Force = Mass * Acceleration. This allows us to make a prediction of how two masses will interact with each other. If a comet comes in contact with the gravitational force of a star how will it’s trajectory change? It turns out we can really accurately predict these sorts of things. In fact we’ve gotten so good at it that we can routinely shoot people out of the atmosphere onto a space station. Imagine throwing a ball into a bucket ten football fields away, nailing it every single time, and you get a sense for the scale of the accuracy of our understanding of gravity; we are really confident in our practical understanding of gravity.
Less abstract examples can be found by looking at the technology you use daily. Your phone is built on countless predictions. Lithium ions can store chemical potential energy and release it in controlled discharge of electricity. Semiconductive chips can be used to generate states with resolution that would have been unimaginable just ten years ago. Capacitors in your touchscreen change potential when your finger touches them and communicate with the software controlling the physical state of the phone. The construction of extremely precise and robust systems that encapsulate many different disciplines of science and engineering is unassailable evidence that we know things are true.
In my mind this is science at it’s core. People who rarely think about these sorts of things would be astonished to see the amount of things we know are true when running even the simplest experiment. A scientist would be paralyzed the instant they step into the lab if they couldn’t treat knowledge as true. Progress would be impossible without previous knowledge.
Karl Popper, the most influential science philosopher of the 20th century, developed the idea of falsifiability to distinguish science from non-science. For something to be true it must be falsifiable. An idea that is amorphous and adapts to data cannot be evaluated to be true. So, some practical advice on how to determine whether something is true.
Take the theory or statement being posited and extrapolate it to make falsifiable predictions, and then check those predictions against the best available real world data. Accept nothing as true based on the credentials of a person, or perceived political bias, and strive to be completely agnostic of the merit of a statement prima face. There are many examples I could give of false narratives in the media but in the interest of not being alienating I’ll make one up fresh. Starting with my invented news headline “Aliens have landed on Earth, but don’t worry they’re friendly.” Here are some questions I might ask:
How do we know aliens landed on Earth?
There is a previously unknown life form that is now observable on earth.
If they are truly aliens, they should have genetic material unrelated to known species, or genetic material unrecognizable to humans.
If they landed on earth, they needed some method of transport to get here, there should be a ship.
How do we know they’re friendly?
If they’re friendly, presumably they’re not killing people
They are not subsuming resources while being on Earth
They did not try to disguise their arrival
It is time consuming to apply this framework but the alternative is dangerous. Inability to distinguish truth from narrative has enabled the most horrific acts in human history. In the absence of the energy to maintain this skepticism the presence of sense making institutions is meant to reliably fill the void. This used to be the role of the NYT, Washington Post, etc but these institutions have fallen prey to ideology. I recommend finding some journalists / writers that write in good faith with a variety of slants. Some recommendations: Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi, Jesse Singal, James Lindsay, Jordan Peterson, Freddie De Boer, Douglas Murray. Don’t agree with any of them, but I’m pretty sure each of them has a little bit of the truth.